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John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

As long as I’ve been blogging, I’ve been quite interested in the various EHR selection tools that are available out there. For a while, it seems like there was a new EHR selection tool coming out every week. The frenzy of EHR selection tools has mostly stopped and only a few major ones remain. One of those is EHR consultant (Full Disclosure: Has been an advertiser on EMR and HIPAA for many years) which has been doing this as long as anyone and has one of the most comprehensive EHR databases out there. The other that has lasted all this time is EHR Selector. Then, to round out the various EHR selection websites, there are the websites out there like Medical Software Advice and even the AAFP offers a tool to help in EHR selection (only available for AAFP members).

As I suggest in my e-Book on EMR selection, I think you should take advantage of multiple EHR selection tools. I call it triangulating the data since none of them are comprehensive with the EHR world changing so quickly. So, you take all of the data and triangulate down to the best EHR possible.

Many might wonder why I’m talking about EHR selection anyway. Well, if you’re being generous, we’re somewhere around 50% EHR adoption. That’s still a lot of doctors who haven’t adopted EHR. Add to that the number of clinics that are looking to switch EHR software, and there’s still a big need for great EHR selection tools.

The reason I started this look at EHR selection websites is because EHR Selector has rolled out an Open Beta with new features. The best feature they’ve rolled out is that EHR selector is now free for everyone to use. I was pretty harsh on EHR selector in the past for charging doctors to use their service. That business model just didn’t make sense to me. Ironically, Carl Bergman (one of the people behind EHR Selector), has since become a regular reader of this site and we regularly exchange emails about the EHR world. So, I’m glad that he converted the service to a free service for everyone to use.

I tried out the new release of EHR selector and I have some mixed reviews. It is a beta release so that’s partially to be expected. I was a bit overwhelmed by the number of fields I had to complete to get into the tool. I imagine that could be streamlined some to make it a better experience for the user. Although, I expect the data is part of the reason the service can be made free. Plus, the more data you offer, the better customized experience the EHR selection tool can offer you.

What I do love about EHR Selector is that it’s always had a deep set of data available. I wonder if this will backfire for some users thanks to the paradox of choice. Although, as a data lover I really love all the data. Plus, they could help solve this issue with how they choose to display the various EHR and their data with a beautiful UI. I don’t think the UI is to that point yet, but having the data is the first step in that process.

My favorite feature of EHR Selector is the Compare EHR feature. I love seeing the features of multiple EHR’s compared side by side. This is where all the EHR data points becomes really valuable as well. One thing I do wish is there was more than just a check mark for each EHR data point. I’d love to have some qualitative description or images of each data point so you could really compare the EHR features that matter most to you.

One of the other shortcomings of EHR Selector is they haven’t yet gotten the data for all 300+ EHR vendors. No doubt that’s a daunting task and you have to start somewhere. I expect they’ll work to resolve this over time. Plus, they need the support of the EHR vendors to be able to get the data as well (not always an easy task).

Certainly EHR Selector isn’t perfect yet, but with its new Free feature it’s worth taking a look at if you’re in the market for an EHR. It’s another nice data point in the EHR selection process.

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